Effective communication is critical for successful business. The desire to enhance communication, in conjunction with incredible advances in processing technology, have lead to new and effective communication systems for businesses. For example, traditional data-only networks have now merged with traditional voice-only networks to form sophisticated hybrid Internet Protocol (IP) Telephone systems. The cost and performance benefits associated with IP Telephone systems has lead to their successful implementation in hundreds of companies.
One popular service now offered over IP Telephony systems is the voice conference. In a voice conference, multiple participants engage in discussions through the support of the IP Telephone backbone. The participants may be located virtually anywhere, with the backbone seamlessly connecting the participants as if they were in the same conference room.
In the past, the IP Telephony system assigned a single media processor to each voice conference. The assigned media processor handled the entire data flow generated by all participants in the voice conference. However, because the media processor had limited computational capabilities and memory resources, the media processor could only process a limited number of voice channels. Thus, additional individuals simply could not participate in a voice conference when the media processor channel limits had been reached.
Depending on the resources available to the media processor, and the number of conference participants, a single media processor sometimes handled multiple independent, relatively small voice conferences. For example, a single media processor might divide its total voice channel processing capability between three small, but independent, voice conferences. However, such configurations led to yet another difficulty, namely resource fragmentation.
Whenever a media processor hosted one or more voice conferences, each voice conference consumed a certain number of voice channel resources. As a result, a request for a new voice conference with more participants than available voice channel resources had to be refused. For example, a media processor supporting 20 voice channels, currently hosting a marketing voice conference with 10 channels and a design voice conference with 5 channels, could not support a sales voice conference requiring 6 or more channels. The remaining 5 voice channels were fragmented away from the original 20 voice channels, and were effectively an unavailable resource for the media processor.
In order to expand capacity, multiple media processors were sometimes provided, with each media processor again handling the entirety of one or more voice conferences. However, even when multiple media processors were present, the IP Telephony system assigned voice conferences to the media processors in the same way. Consequently, rather than generating resource fragmentation on a single media processor, the IP Telephone system generated resource fragmentation on multiple media processors.